In wireless communication systems, it is generally desirable to reduce overhead associated with signaling for voice and data services, system information, control, etc. In traditional cellular systems such as that defined by the High Rate Packet Data (HRPD) standard and the Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS), bearer establishment is enabled through dedicated signaling. The bearer defines radio parameters, for example, time slot, frequency, code, etc., associated with a channel during a call. In voice communications for example a dedicated channel is assigned to each user. In High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) systems, transport format and modulation/coding parameters (TFRI) are provided using dedicated control signaling on a shared control channel, wherein the shared control channel also signals the code channel assigned to the user.
In some data only (DO) systems, voice is served using the internet protocol (VoIP). It is known to improve such systems for VoIP traffic using hybrid automatic repeat request (HARQ) error correction schemes and smaller packet sizes. While VoIP users have the same benefits of advanced link adaptation and statistical multiplexing as data users, the greatly increased number of users that may be served because of the smaller voice packet sizes places a burden on control mechanisms of the system. It can be easily envisioned, for example, that 30 times as many voice packets could be served in a given frame than data packets. There are typically about 1500 bytes for data and about 15-50 bytes for voice, depending on the vocoder rate. Present resource allocation policies however are not designed to handle such a large number of allocations efficiently given the varying size of the voice packet.
It is known to group multiple voice users together which share a set of time frequency resources. It is also known to use bitmap signaling to efficiently allocate portions of the shared resource to the set of voice users sharing the same time frequency resource. However, these techniques are deficient in two ways. First, they do not address allocating different amounts of time-frequency resources for different sizes of voice packets. Second, they do not address how to effectively use the shared time frequency resources if there are fewer users than available time frequency resources. Thus, there is a need for efficiently and flexibly allocating resources of varying size to a group of users. In packet based systems the term “data” is meant to signify payload information for any service, voice or data.
The various aspects, features and advantages of the present disclosure will become more fully apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon careful consideration of the following Detailed Description thereof with the accompanying drawings described below. The drawings may have been simplified for clarity and are not necessarily drawn to scale.